Valuing Women With Disabilities

Valuing Women With Disabilities: Infantilised, Medicalised,
Pauperised? Disability is too often framed as separate and foreign
to what matters for women (Frances Ryan). The relative absence of
disability in the politics of the feminist movement, as Rosemarie
Garland Thomson suggests, means ‘that feminist assumptions can fail
to take into account disabled women’s situations’ because ‘some of
the differences that disability provokes can complicate feminism’s
understanding of female bodies and the oppression of them’. This
leads Susan Wendell to posit that: 'we need a feminist theory of
disability. Both because 16 per cent of women are disabled, and
because this oppression of disabled people is so closely linked to
the cultural oppression of the body'. The seminar asks has the
feminist movement and its scholarship too often forgotten disabled
women? How do we ensure scholarship, across the humanities and
social sciences, takes an intersectional approach to understanding
multiple identities and experiences of women with disabilities from
Black and Minority Ethnic communities? In this seminar Dr Helen
Brookman celebrates the work of Anna Gurney, a pioneering
nineteenth-century scholar of Anglo-Saxon, who became a wheelchair
user following an illness in childhood. Dr Brookman examines the
impact Gurney's disability had on her scholarly praxis and
considers the implications for writing the feminist history of
scholarship. Julie Jaye Charles FRSA SARSM is Chief Executive and
founder of Equalities National Council of Disabled People and
Carers from Black and Minority Ethnic communities. For 30 years,
Julie has been deeply involved in developing Black (BME) community
driven strategies directly on improving the well-being,
representation and social inclusion of those communities. She will
discuss her vision of working with government to recognise and
abolish the multiple inequalities and social exclusion which form
the many barriers that undermine the value of BME disabled people
and carers, across the spectrum of Health, Social Well-being and
Care, Housing, Employment, Volunteering, Education, and Crime.